LOA!!!!

On Tuesday we received our Letter of Acceptance (LOA) from China. This is one of the most important pieces of paperwork through this whole process and the one that you generally wait the longest for. I am happy to report that our wait was only 41 days. Many families wait an average of 2-3 months and some have waited 100+ days so we lucked out. This paper says that China approves us to adopt the specific child that we have been matched with. We quickly signed our LOA and overnighted it back to our agency. They received early afternoon on Wednesday and overnighted it along with our i800 paperwork to the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services). The i800 finalizes the immigration process for our new daughter and allows us to bring her home. We hope to receive our i800 approval in the next 2 weeks. From there our information is sent to the National Visa Center (NVC) and then sent to the U.S. Embassy in Guangzhou, China, which is the city where we will spent our second week finalizing the U.S. side of the adoption. They first week will be spent in Tiayuan, Shanxi, China, which is the capitol city of the province our daughter is from with a brief day trip to Datong City, Shanxi which is where her orphanage is located.

Once our information is send to the NVC, there are a few more weeks of paperwork back and forth between the U.S. Embassy in China and the CCCWA (China Center for Children's Welfare and Adoption). Then hopefully in early December we will receive travel approval from China and a Consulate appointment for us to finalize things the second week we are there.  Once we receive travel approval we will be able to book our plane tickets and finalize our travel plans. It will be very last minute and we won't know our exact travel dates until a couple weeks before we leave at the most.

Hopefully the paperwork moves very quickly and we can have her in our arms before the New Year but there is a good chance we will leave for China on January 2 or 3.

Pray for our paperwork to move through all of the systems quickly and without any hold ups and pray for our sweet girl. I have talked with another family through a Facebook adoption group who are adopting a little boy from the same orphanage and they are on the flight to China right now to pick him up. They are going to try to visit the orphanage and check on our little one and get some pictures for us. Hopefully by the middle of next week we will have some new photos and updated information on our little girl. We are so grateful to this family for checking on her and can't wait to see the pictures of them with their new little guy and hopefully hear a good report about our sweetie. Thank you in advance Whichard Family for your generosity and good luck on Monday! (That is the day they will get their son, Evan. That day is known as "Gotcha Day").

We will keep you all up to date over the next few weeks as the paper work moves a little quicker through this point of the process. We will be boarding that LONG flight before we realize what hit us!

P.S. We are still trying to agree on a name. If you talk to my husband tell him to make a decision already!